European politicians were in frantic meetings this weekend amid the unprecedented crisis sparked by an Italian politician whose appointment MEPs say will 'undermine the quality' of EU justice.

The controversy over Italy's would-be justice commissioner's fitness for office is dividing MEPs. Now it is being also seen as having crippled the authority of the incoming EC president, Jose Manuel Barroso.

The debacle is also resonating in Italy, where the Catholic church has become embroiled in the debate over whether Rocco Buttiglione should be in charge of rights, civil liberties and immigration issues for Europe.

Liberal and socialist groups, who believe Buttiglione, a friend of the Pope, has views that make him unfit for office, were scrambling to rally enough MEPs to vote down the entire 25-member commission on Wednesday.

The 'nuclear option' is the last resort for MEPs, who have pressed Barroso to drop the nominee or at least shuffle him out of such a sensitive role.

A defiant Barroso - who has stood by Buttiglione and proposed, to appease concern, that he be shadowed by four commissioners for civil liberties issues - says he is confident his commission will survive. He described the critics as 'extremists'. According to reports, Barroso thinks he will win 363 votes, enough, given the numbers expected to abstain, to confirm his team.

Among those campaigning against Barroso's commission is MEP Antonio di Pietro, the former Milan magistrate who led anti-corruption investigations. He said yesterday: 'I am calling on all European liberals to vote against this whole commission.

'Unless there is some change, I hope the Barroso commission will be voted out,' di Pietro said. 'I say that not just because of Mr Buttiglione's views on homosexuals. I say it because I believe that no member of Berlusconi's government should be given control of jus tice for the EU. The Berlusconi government is an anomaly as far as the law.

Martin Schulz, a German MEP and leader of 200-strong socialist group, said Barroso was risking a calamitous defeat. If Barroso's gamble does not pay off, he could find himself starting his five-year term with a constitutional crisis. And this in the same week in which Europe's leaders will be in Rome to sign the new EU constitution.

Should Barroso's gamble fail, the outgoing commission, led by Italian Romano Prodi, will have to preside over a grandiose ceremony in the caput mundi on Friday while Barroso retreats to form a new team.

At the same time, Vatican officials will be still upset that the Pope's plea for Europe's Christian roots to be enshrined in its constitution landed on deaf, northern European ears.

From the Holy See, some of the strongest cries of foul play rose last week amid a furious Europe-wide debate over the effects of mixing religion with politics. While Buttiglione's view that homosexuality is a 'sin but not a crime' and marriage exists to allow women to have children with the protection of a man caused offence across progressive-thinking Europe, in Italy the uproar was seen by many as a sign that Europe's obsession with being 'politically correct' has gone too far.

'There are only three categories of people who are not protected by political correctness and therefore you can say anything bad you want about them,' Vittorio Messori, Italy's leading Catholic writer told Il Messaggero, 'Catholics, smokers and hunters'.

The Avvenire newspaper of the Roman Catholic Bishops Conference complained that the decision of the European Rights Commission to rule Buttiglione unfit for public office 'because of what he thinks' is 'a sad sign for civilisation - not for religion.'

'They have discriminated against a person on the basis of his faith and his ideas,' the paper said.